There is a peculiar art to Washington politics that involves speaking loudly while carrying a very small stick.
In this theater of the absurd, few performances have been more meticulously staged than that of Senator Cory Booker, who has mastered the delicate dance of appearing to resist while fundamentally acquiescing.
The latest act in this long-running production has drawn the ire of progressive Democrat Lisa McCormick, who has thrown down the gauntlet with the fury of a modern-day Huey Long.
The progressive McCormick is accusing Booker of doing nothing to stop what she calls “the greatest corruption show on earth” — the two dozen Trump-branded real estate projects proliferating across the globe while their namesake occupies the White House.
McCormick said that during the four years that Donald Trump serves his second term as president, he stands to profit from a total of 22 projects around the globe, according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington’s review of press releases, news reports, and information made available by the Trump Organization.
In ten foreign countries, these developers will seek subcontractors, buyers and permits from the government, creating massive conflicts of interest for Trump, as he weighs American foreign policy against his own financial incentives.
The Unwelcome Mat for Empire
While American democracy grapples with existential threats, the Trump Organization has been busy building its own foreign policy apparatus — not through diplomatic channels, but through concrete and steel.
“The blueprint is simple: take the presidential seal, add it to a global branding iron, and stamp it across twenty-two developments from Oman to Uruguay, India to Indonesia,” said McCormick. “The conflict of interest is so blatant it would be comical if it weren’t so dangerous.”
Consider the geography of this shadow empire.
In Oman, a Trump hotel, golf course, and residences rise from government-owned land with an official tourism agency as a partner.
In Serbia, another Trump hotel occupies state-owned property, becoming a political football in that country’s internal conflicts.
In Indonesia, the government recently ordered a halt to a Trump-linked development over environmental concerns — until, one might wonder, diplomatic pressures were applied.
The pattern repeats across ten countries, with particularly dense clusters in Saudi Arabia and India, where business partners with deep government ties are building eight separate Trump projects.
Yet from Senator Booker, we hear the sound of calculated silence.
McCormick, in her characteristic bluntness, calls this what it is: “Cory Booker must be fired and replaced with a leader who dares to stand up against Donald Trump’s tyranny.”
The Table of Global Influence
International Trump-Branded Projects During Presidency
The Political Placebo
What makes this spectacle so galling to critics like McCormick is that it follows a familiar pattern they call “the political placebo” — the appearance of resistance without its substance. Booker, they note, has perfected this art.
He once testified against a colleague in a confirmation hearing, a dramatic break with Senate decorum that progressives cheered.
Yet shortly thereafter, he joined Republicans to kill a proposal to lower prescription drug prices, a move that confirmed some progressives’ suspicions that he is too closely allied with corporate interests in the Democratic Party.
This duality defines Booker’s approach to the Trump era. He delivers marathon speeches on the Senate floor, once speaking for over twenty-four hours in what he called a “moral moment.”
Yet when it comes to concrete action to disrupt the web of Trump’s foreign business interests, the trail goes cold.
He voted for the GENIUS Act, which McCormick says “paved the way for Trump’s corruption,” and remained notably quiet as the Trump Organization quietly omitted a key limitation from its ethics plan — the ban on new foreign deals that had been present during Trump’s first term.
McCormick’s accusation cuts deeper than most because she represents the progressive wing that has long distrusted Booker.
“He’s a non-starter right now,” Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos told The New Republic in 2017. “He hasn’t proven his ability to distance himself from the Wall Street and Big Pharma interests that have basically been the bedrock of his support.”
This perception has dogged Booker for years, with critics noting his notorious 2012 appearance on Meet the Press, where he defended vulture capitalism and called the Obama campaign’s attacks on private equity “nauseating.”
The McCormick Alternative
While Booker navigates the corridors of establishment power, McCormick has built her political identity as the antithesis of what she calls “the cowardly surrender of Democratic leadership.”
Her platform reads like a modern “Share Our Wealth” plan, demanding a cap on exorbitant personal fortunes to fund universal access to education, healthcare, and dignified retirement.
She challenged incumbent Senator Bob Menendez in the 2018 Democratic primary, earning a surprising 38 percent of the vote with a genuine grassroots campaign.
McCormick represents a growing faction within the Democratic Party that has lost patience with what she calls “performance artists of protest” — politicians who talk about resisting Trump while enabling his rise through calculated capitulation.
Her demand for a purge of Democratic leadership, including Schumer and, by extension, Booker, signals an ideological civil war that could define the party’s future.
The Curtain Call
The tragedy, as McCormick frames it, is not merely the corruption — it’s the collaboration.
“Any Democratic official who is not aggressively working to remove Chuck Schumer as Senate Minority Leader must be considered equally responsible for allowing Donald Trump to get away with his crimes,” she declared. “Silence is complicity.”
As twenty-two Trump towers rise abroad while democratic norms crumble at home, the question becomes whether the American people will continue to accept the political theater or demand something substantive.
The show horse — to borrow the Lautenberg family’s description of Booker — may prance impressively across the stage, but what good is a show horse when the house is on fire?
The curtain hasn’t fallen on this drama yet, but the critics are growing restless.
And in New Jersey, Lisa McCormick is writing a very different script — one that doesn’t require a theatrical tent or a marathon speech to make its point, just the uncomfortable truth that while some politicians are busy performing resistance, others are actually practicing it.
